The safe storage of prescription medications, such as pills and the like, has been problematic in the past, so much so, that the United States Federal government enacted safety laws to govern such storage containers. As a large portion of the population, in particular the elderly and the infirm, take these prescription medications for one ailment or another, safe storage of their prescriptions is necessary. It has been an unfortunate result that until now many of the storage containers have not been safe. Young children and toddlers have been able to gain access to the contents of many of the containers and have suffered serious illness and even death as a result.
Thus, there has long been a need for storage containers which are child resistant yet, at the same time, adult friendly. U.S. Pat. No. 4,171,057, to Gach, relates to a child-resistant medicine vial. The medicine vial according to Gach has a cap with two concentric skirts, one inside of the other. The inside skirt tightly fits into an opening of the container, while the outside skirt rides outside of the neck of the container. The outside skirt has a lug on an inner surface which, when the outside skirt is squeezed, rides up on an upwardly extending ramp on a flange encircling the neck of the container just below the outside skirt. Thus when the cap is squeezed and turned, the lug rides up the ramp pulling the inner skirt out of the neck of the container. However, it may be possible to remove the cap from the container if sufficient leverage were able to be obtained between the outer skirt and the flange on the neck of the container, especially so if the cap were not placed fully onto the container.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,642,161, to Stroud, relates to a safety lid for flanged containers. A two-piece cap assembly acts as a safety lid for the container. The first piece, a base cap, has a skirt which fits inside of the container and a skirt which fits outside of the container. The skirt which fits outside of the container has one or more movable locking tabs which engage the flange on the container. The second piece of the safety lid is a top cap rotatably mounted on the base cap. The top cap has one or more recessed edges around its peripheral edge, so that the movable locking tabs on the base cap may only be pressed into the recesses. When the locking tabs are manipulated in this manner they disengage from the flange on the container thereby allowing the two-piece cap to be removed from the container. Manufacturing of the two-piece cap requires more material and tooling, and as such, is more expensive to manufacture. Furthermore, the top cap may break off of the base cap, thereby allowing the locking tabs to be manipulated at any circumference point around the container and may be accidentally opened by children.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,720,342, to Vercillo, relates to a closure associated with a container. The closure has a peripheral skirt with an annular lip about its lower circumference which fits into an annular groove on a container. The closure is constructed of a resilient material with a slow return rate, so that as the closure is pressed or screwed onto the container, the lip slides over an outer portion of the groove until seated within the valley of the groove itself. In order to remove or unscrew the closure from the container, the closure is first pressed downward over a portion of the container having an outward slope such that the closure lip is disengaged from the groove. Because of the slow rate of return of the closure material, the closure can be removed from the container without the lip re-engaging the groove. With age and as the result of the wear and tear of the repeated flexing, however, the return rate of the material may give to such a point that the normal rest position of the lip is outside of the groove, thereby defeating the purpose of the safety closure.
Due to the industry's failure to provide a suitable storage cap and vial for prescription medications and the like, capable of being both child-resistant and adult-friendly and not subject to breakage, normal wear and tear of its components, or prohibitively expensive to manufacture, there remains a need for the development of one.